Hyman Hartman is a research scientist at MIT. His special interest has been to deduce the origin of life, of the genetic code, of the ribosome, of the eukaryotic cell, of photosynthesis, and of the metabolic cycle, by looking into their information structures and attempting to locate their oldest evolutionary parts.

He calls his approach a documentary hypothesis, after the biblical analysts who found the oldest written parts, for example the J-writer and E-writer, by linguistic analysis.